Is it possible not to close the tunnel when blocking a smartphone?

[garett]

Hello! Need some help - I have iPhone 15 (iOS 17.5.1) with OpenVPN Connect installed. So the main problem is - If I establish a connection and then the phone is blocked, the VPN tunnel is automatically terminated. An additional complication is that two-factor authentication is used - to establish a connection, I have to generate 6 digits using Google Authenticator.Thus, it is very inconvenient to establish a connection every 30 seconds - is there any way to ignore the blocking of the phone - so that the tunnel constantly exists? Thank you for answers.

[torik]

Hello, we have the same problem. Many employees are experiencing issues where their smartphones cannot maintain a connection when the phone goes to sleep, and the phone cannot reconnect when it wakes up. We need OPENVPN to keep the connection active while the phone is blocked. Can you help us with this?

[JosephS]

Hi garret,

Whenever the phone screen gets locked the connection goes in sleep mode (you can check the client logs and will see an OS Event: SLEEP whenever that occurs). Once you unlock the phone the connection should be restored without the need to re-authenticate.
By reading your case I'd assume the reason why you need to re-authenticate could be because your VPN server is configured with short session timers.
I would suggest increasing session token timeout and TLS renegotiation period values server-side.


With Regards,
JosephS